Page:Alexander Macbain - An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language.djvu/19



the publication of my Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language in January, 1896, I have had the benefit of criticisms of that work both publicly and privately, and the result of these, along with what I have gleaned from my own reading and thinking, I here give to the Gaelic Society and the public, so as to form a sort of addenda et corrigenda to my dictionary. I have to thank the critics of that work for their almost unanimous praise of it; its reception was very flattering indeed. The criticisms of most weight were from foreign scholars, the best in the way of addition and suggestion being that of Prof. Kuno Meyer in the Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie. In Scotland the Inverness Courier gave the weightiest judgment on the general philology of the work; and other papers and periodicals as well added their quota of fruitful criticism. Nor did the work fail to meet with critics who acted on Goldsmith's golden rule in the "Citizen of the World"—to ask of any comedy why it was not a tragedy, and of any tragedy why it was not a comedy. I was asked how I had not given derivative words—though for that matter most of the seven thousand words in the Dictionary are derivatives; such a question overlooked the character of the work. Manifest derivatives belong to ordinary dictionaries, not to an etymological one. This was clearly indicated in the preface; the work, too, followed the best models on the subject—Prellwitz, Wharton, and Skeat. Another criticism was unscientific in the extreme: I was found fault with for excluding Irish words! Why, it was the best service I could render to Celtic philology to present a pure vocabulary of the